On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage. After the iPhone, Apple Pay, and, the doll of the party, the Apple Watch, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give some more details about Apple Health, an app that had been announced back in June and will eventually integrate with the Apple Watch. In that June announcement, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi bragged that the app would let users “monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.”

As promised, Health is a powerful app. It allows users to track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium. But there’s a notable exception. Apple Health doesn’t track menstruation, an omission that was quickly seized upon by many tech writers as, well, ridiculous. The Verge asked “is it really too much to ask that Apple treat women, and their health, with as much care as they've treated humanity’s sodium intake?” How could Apple release a health-tracking app without the ability to monitor what is likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self tracking?

Women have tracked their cycles for thousands of years. St. Augustine spoke against timing sexual activity to coincide with periods of infertility (a method that would require period-tracking) as far back as 388. “Is it not you who used to counsel us to observe as much as possible the time when a woman, after her purification, is most likely to conceive, and to abstain from cohabitation at that time, lest the soul should be entangled in flesh?” he said, according to one translation, before going on to condemn the method. Despite there being little written documentation of these records, women have long kept notes on their own cycles. Before apps, they used spreadsheets and online calendars. And before that, they used plain old paper. Today, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps available in the iTunes store. And yet, in a health app Apple describes as “comprehensive,” there is no way to simply tick on the calendar that your period has started, and when it has stopped.

When Amelia Greenhall moved to San Francisco from Seattle, she looked for a Quantified Self meet-up. She had been active in the Seattle QS community, and quickly found the corresponding group in San Francisco. Soon, she was organizing the Bay Area meetings herself. But while she enjoyed the community there, something was missing.

“After each one, women would come up to me and say, ‘I wish we could talk about periods or fertility or dating or anything that wasn’t getting talked about.’ It just felt like there was a lot getting left out,” she said. And the meetings, set in the belly of the Silicon Valley beast, felt like tech meetings. “It was just kind of like a microcosm of the tech world where dudes are willing to speak about the most boring trivial stuff as if it’s the best invention ever, and these women would have these really cool things and they’re like, ‘Oh I don’t know if anybody would be interested.’” So Greenhall started the first ever QSXX meet up—a space for women to showcase their QS projects, talk about what worked for them, and find a smaller community within the larger group.

Soon, QSXX groups popped up in Boston and New York City. “The conversations seemed more real and more interesting and we were talking about the problems with devices and apps and it turned out much as I was hoping,” said Greenhall. Maggie Delano started one in Boston, after having a conversation with another woman about the differences in what some women want to track. “We were talking about how the kinds of things that women need to track are really different, and things can change a lot more throughout the month than they might for other people,” she said. The women who attend these meet-ups discuss what they want to track, present their projects, and form bonds within the smaller community that some say they couldn’t quite forge at the bigger meet-ups.

"The conversations seemed more real and more interesting."

Whitney Erin Boesel, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and active QS member, said it took her a few years of being involved in the QS community before she realized that there was little-to-no emphasis on women’s issues. Which is weird, she pointed out, because outside the QS world one might think women would be more likely to track personal data than men are, whether that’s calories or menstruation. “So many regular facets of being a woman in a western culture are highly likely to make one track,” Boesel said, “and yet those were things I wasn’t seeing in the QS context.”

I spoke with Boesel, Greenhall, Delano, and others about what it’s like to be women interested in the quantified-self movement. Their experiences were similar: They really enjoyed the work, the problem-solving, the personalization. But they also echoed that when it comes to forward-facing technology—apps and devices marketed for the masses—there was a clear bias toward men’s interests. Even apps developed for women are often designed by men, and it’s not hard to tell. Apple Health, they said, and its mysterious omission of parameters relevant to women, isn’t the exception, it’s the rule.

Before we go on, a definitional point that many I spoke with asked me to make clear: There is a difference between the quantified-self community and movement, and what Boesel calls the “tracking industrial complex,” by which she means the suite of apps and gadgets available in the commercial world. Quantified Self or QS, capitalized, is a collective of people interested in tracking elements of their lives in some way. They have a loose organization, and organize conferences in Europe and the United States each year. Some of them use apps and devices, but some of them don’t. “Lots of people within QS don’t use apps or anything digital,” Boesel said. So QS is the community, and tracking products are the apps and hardware designed for commercial use. Great, let’s continue.

* * *

There’s no better place to look for evidence of quantified self apps designed by men for men than the sex-tracking apps on the market. On principle, sex is something that one might guess an equal number of men and women are interested in. And yet looking at the apps out there for tracking bedroom activity is like looking at a caricature of bad porn. Many of them base quality of sex on things like the amount of thrusting that goes on and how loud the partner is. Apps with names like iThrust and Sex Stamina Tester and Sex Counter Tease ask users to place their phones on the bed so that the built in accelerometer can measure “strokes” and offer men a ranking among other users. One app encourages people to share their stamina and determine whether the user is “good enough to compete with the Don Juans in the Top 10.”

None of this is malicious, said Deborah Lupton, a researcher at the University of Canberra, who recently wrote a paper documenting many of these sex-tracking apps titled “Quantified Sex.” Sara Watson, another fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, points out that many of these strange measurements come from what the phone is capable of measuring: movement and sound. “That just has to do with the reductive nature of tracking something with an accelerometer,” she said. But the apps do reflect a certain kind of bias. “I think the designers, who are mostly men are, they’re just taking up norms and assumptions that are embedded in our society about women’s fertility and sexuality, and reproducing them,” Lupton said. So sex is judged by thrusting, success is judged by endurance, and pleasure is measured in moans. “Regardless of the type of app, we should view it as a cultural product rather than something that’s just popped up out of the blue.”

Sex is judged by thrusting, success is judged by endurance, and pleasure is measured in moans.

If sex-tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think sex is, then fertility-tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think about periods. These apps are still designed largely by men, but now instead of sexual prowess and a Don Juan ranking, the goal is pregnancy.

Many of these invite women to give their partners access to the information. The app Glow sends a little note when a user’s partner is entering her fertile period, along with helpful seduction advice like bring her a bouquet. The vast majority of these period-tracking apps are pink. Many of them are covered in flowers. The fact that menstrual-tracking and fertility-tracking are almost always lumped together is, in itself, indicative of how developers think about women, said Lupton. “When you look at those types of apps they’re completely about the surveillance of pregnant women and making them ever more responsible and vigilant about their bodies for the sake of their fetus,” Lupton said.

Yet the appetite for period trackers is huge. And it has been huge for a long time. Seven years ago, long before apps like Clue or Glow hit the market, Heather Rivers was in college and was tracking her period using an excel spreadsheet. She thought there must be a better way, but when she Googled for period trackers she couldn’t find one. “When I didn’t find anything I decided to just make a simple weekend project version,” she told me. “Thus was born Monthly Info.” The site was simple—users record the start and end to their period and the system extrapolates from their history to guess when their next cycle will start. Trackers could set up customizable reminders, so when it was almost that time they’d get a little email with whatever message they chose.

Monthly Info was really designed for Rivers, but she added a user signup system mostly because it was easy. And people signed up. A lot of people. “It kind of took off on its own from there and grew to over 100,000 users,” she said. “There was apparently a need for something like this, because it didn’t take much energy to make or grow.” Now, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps on the market. Considering the gender imbalance in tech, it’s fair to guess most of them are made by men. Rivers joked that it’s not hard to spot a fertility-tracking app designed by a man. They focus on moods (men want to know when their girlfriends are going to be grouchy) and treat getting pregnant like a level in a video game. “It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you,” said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. “‘We men don’t like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you’re a parking meter.’”

Not all these apps are made by men, of course. In fact, one of the most popular versions, called Clue, was developed by Ida Tin, fueled by a similar problem that Rivers faced. “I was using condoms for contraceptives and I was starting to wonder why there were no better options for me to keep track of my cycle,” Tin said. Much of the design of Clue, which is decidedly non-floral, was natural to Tin. “I just took it totally for granted,” she said, “like of course it's not going to be pink. That seemed very natural. I didn’t want it to be your secret diary… I wanted it to be a very straight, natural part of life.”

“It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you."

It took two years for Tin and her team to build the app into something they were ready to release. By the time they finished, they had competition. Glow, a Clue competitor headed by Max Levchin, the founder of PayPal and a chairman at Yelp, launched just a month before Clue. “We were very lucky because about a month before we launched Max announced he was launching Glow,” Tin said. “That was lucky for us because he kind of validated this category of apps, and he could do that because he’s a celebrity and he’s a nerdy guy who knows about data. I think that was a great help for us.”

Had Tin launched the app herself, without Levchin’s male validation, would people have taken her seriously? She’s not sure. “I’ve had investors, really, very good, experienced, high-profile investors who will say, ‘I’m not a woman, I don’t understand your product,’” she said. Tin said she’ll sometimes hear investors say thing like, “I don’t invest in products I can’t try myself,” which rules out any female health-tracking products for male investors. “I’ve never been treated badly,” she said, “but I think it just takes more to have them write the check for a female entrepreneur tackling a female health problem.”

* * *

The promise of Quantified Self, the community, is “self-knowledge through numbers.” It’s a broad aim, and one that, in theory, overlaps with the apps and devices in the market. Collecting data can help people better understand themselves, their lives, their needs. But who are those people?

Boesel points to one example of how many even within the QS community assume their users are men: passive tracking apps. These apps run in the background of your phone, and using your movement, theoretically determine things like whether you’re depressed or active or inside too much. This works based on the assumption that your phone is always in your pocket. “Inevitably some dude gets up at a conference and said something how your phone is always on you,” Boesel said. “And every time I’ll stand up, and I’ll be like, ‘Hi, about this phone that is always on you. This is my phone. And there are my pants.’” Passive tracking apps would think that I stay at my desk from morning to night without once getting up to go to the bathroom. Many apps operate under the assumption that your phone is always connected to you, in pockets that women don’t really have.

Let’s go back to Apple’s Health tracker. They don’t quite say it, but Apple’s premise seems to be that Health will one day be the place for everything. “The Health app lets you keep all your health and fitness information in one place on your device and under your control.” All your information. This is one of the streams that quantified-self apps are traveling down—the road to universal data collection. The idea that there is a list of variables that everyone can, and should track.

The thing is, there isn't such a list. How could there be?

There is no universal set of variables that would be meaningful or even possible for everyone to track. The idea that some comprehensive self-tracking app could at some point boil down the universal essentials neglects the fact that humans are different—not just in biology, but in needs and habits and interests. Right now, as these apps are developed largely by men for men, the data they collect might seem to men to be pretty comprehensive.

“There is no universal,” Boesel said. “QS is such a radical individual culture overall that you are the ultimate expert.”

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that preceded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.

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The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.